During the last several years, medical research has found that the ingestion of even moderate amounts of fats/oils/grease will eventually lead to more serious and life threatening diseases. Furthermore, the high caloric content of such fats poses a weight problem for some individuals when ingested in more than minute quantities.
Yet cooking with fats/oils or the like, imparts a distinctive and pleasurable flavor to various foods such as meat and like tissue products and various vegetables. In some instances, the food product is precoated with flour, cornmeal, crackermeal and the like to help absorb the excess oleaginous materials (herein generally referred to as "grease" ) giving the appearance of eliminating the grease, however, the excess grease remains in the coating and unless the coating is stripped from the product before ingestion, the grease is consumed just as before.
Another problem encountered when frying or grilling food, arises from the difficulty in handling such very hot foods which are covered with dripping fat or oil. The present invention also helps to ameliorate this risk of burns from such food as well as aleviate the problem of excessive grease on the food.
The use of absorbent material in the packaging, storage, and transportation of raw food products has been heretofore taught by Niblack et al (U.S. Pat. No. 3,026,209), Coelho (U.S. Pat. No. 4,797,010) and others. These prior art devices were primarily employed in the dispensing, storage, reheating, or transportation of food stuffs. Leon et al (U.S. Pat. No. 4,664,922), discloses a package which is compartmentalized by an intermediate horizontal grid which allows the food to be stored in the upper compartment above the grid and the exudate from the food such as blood and other fluids drips through the grid and is collected in an absorbent pad disposed therebeneath the lower compartment.
Thus, while the prior art addressed the problem of removing and collecting unwanted liquids from raw food during the dispensing, transporting, and/or storing thereof, none have provided a solution to the removal of the excess oleaginous material which foods acquire during frying or grilling from those foods prior to consumption.
It is toward the resolution of this problem that the present invention is directed.